5 Technology Tests for your Sales Force Mobile App

Offline and Low Network (Salesforce)

It’s not the lack of network that is biggest enemy. Most app vendors should at least support offline capability. It’s the poor network that is the biggest enemy. It’s easy to sense when there is no network, but a badly designed app keeps fighting (shall I say buffering !) with low network.

>> Easy way to test this is switch of data connection. Use wi-fi to connect to another phone’s data connection through hot spot. Now switch off data on the other phone. Try your app.

Data synchronization Time

Caching some master data locally on the phone is great to support smoother user experience and particularly offline capability. What becomes Achilles heel for most apps is how much time it takes to sync the data.

>> Easy way to test this is – go to settings > apps > choose your app > clear data > Try login afresh and see how long does it take to login.

Caching v/s Application Size

Most tech teams don’t bother about it, but is a crucial difference between apps that work and the ones that don’t. If you have a feature where history is being maintained, make sure there is a method to how much history is being kept on the phone’s memory. It might be ok in the beginning but soon users will run into a wall.

>> Identify a piece of data in your app, which is listed as a history > create a large number of such transactions elongate the list and see if all the data is available offline with no restriction or without on-demand fetch. If it is, most likely your app is going to bloat over the period.

Geo location Capture

If your enterprise app is meant for managing secondary sales from retail stores, it’s an important capability to be able to use GPS to measure territory coverage. It’s crucial however to understand what combination of map APIs should be used. Speed, accuracy and probability of successful capture are important.

>> Do a Street Corner test. Use your app to do transactions only at street corners of your neighborhood and see if a visual map to check if all your pins are at the corner. Another test is to switch into flight mode and check how many times and how quickly your app is able to capture the GPS.

Image Handling

If your enterprise app captures images, it’s life threatening to leave it to users’ choice of his camera settings that how heavy an image is captured. You will have host of users complaining about not able to sync their data.

>> Quick test will be to change your camera settings to high resolution > switch to 2G network > user a feature that captures images a few times > Try sync and see if takes ages to sync